When These Things Begin

Conversations with Michel Treguer

René Girard (Translated by Trevor Cribben Merrill)

Publication Year: 2014

In this lively series of conversations with writer Michel Treguer, René Girard revisits the major concepts of mimetic theory and explores science, democracy, and the nature of God and freedom. Girard affirms that “our unprecedented present is incomprehensible without Christianity.” Globalization has unified the world, yet civil war and terrorism persist despite free trade and economic growth. Because of mimetic desire and the rivalry it generates, asserts Girard, “whether we’re talking about marriage, friendship, professional relationships, issues with neighbors or matters of national unity, human relations are always under threat.” Literary masters including Marivaux, Dostoevsky, and Joyce understood this, as did archaic religion, which warded off violence with blood sacrifice. Christianity brought a new understanding of sacrifice, giving rise not only to modern rationality and science but also to a fragile system that is, in Girard’s words, “always teetering between a new golden age and a destructive apocalypse.” Treguer, a skeptic of mimetic theory, wonders: “Is what he’s telling me true...or is it just a nice story, a way of looking at things?” In response, Girard makes a compelling case for his theory.

Cover

Title Page, About the Series, Copyright

Contents

Introduction

René Girard is truly an extraordinary character. He was born in 1923
in Avignon, France, but since 1947 he has lived in the United States,
where he met his wife and taught for many years at Stanford University.
The title of his first book—Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque
(1961), “Romantic Lie and Novelistic Truth,” or, as the English edition...

Chapter 1. A First Overview: Here and Now

MICHEL TREGUER: René, even though it may not be a very logical starting
point, before laying out your thought in a more organized way, I would like to
begin here and now, in the present moment in which our lives are immersed,
and which, for some time now, we have seen unfurling before our eyes like a
film in fast-forward. I want to do this in order to give the reader a glimpse of...

Chapter 2. Mimetic Desire: Shakespeare rather than Plato

MT: At the beginning of your thesis there was the word “mimetic.” Can you
tell us again how it should be understood?

RG: Human relations are subject to conflict: whether we’re talking about
marriage, friendship, professional relationships, issues with neighbors or
matters of national unity, human relations are always under...

Chapter 3. The Mimetic Crisis: Sacrificial Worlds

MT: Let’s go back to the formation of societies. We were talking about the
moment when the escalation of the mimetic crisis leads to a “contagion of
antagonisms.”

RG: Inasmuch as they desire the same thing, the members of the group become
antagonists, in pairs, in triangles, in polygons, in whatever configurations you
can imagine. The contagion signifies that some of them are going to abandon...

Chapter 4. The Bible

MT: We’re making our way toward the great historical rupture, the creation
of History itself, that you see the word of Christ as opening up. But don’t you
think it would be a good idea to stop and talk about the Bible?

RG: Yes. One senses that the Bible is heading toward Revelation properly
speaking in the New Testament.
In the most primitive pagan myths, sacrifice...

Chapter 5. Christ (Orders and Disorders)

MT: In your view, Christian revelation triggers a process that is global,
worldwide or perhaps even wider. We emerge from the lie, from the mythical
shadow, and are reborn under the sun of truth. It’s the beginning of History
as such, and it’s not just one more myth.

RG: From a Christian point of view, it could be said that, in a sense, Creation
starts up again. Creation damaged by...

Chapter 6. A Return to Imitation

MT: Let’s go back over the imitation that Plato saw everywhere, except where
its role was most important: in acquisitive behaviors, in the competition of
desires.

RG: Mimesis is the Greek word for imitation. Dance is the most mimetic of
all the arts, and indeed it’s easy to see its relationship with contagion, the
collective trance; we know of its role in sacrifices. In the Gospels...

Chapter 7. Science

MT: The consensus is that Christianity has never ceased to lag behind on the
question of scientific development, to oppose the new worldviews attached
to theories of physics such as Galileo’s. But in truth, you say, at a deeper level,
it is really Christianity that makes science possible by desacralizing the real,
by freeing people from magical causalities. Once we stop seeing storms as...

Chapter 8. The One and the Many

MT: Is the uniformization of the world a mandatory ransom for progress,
material progress on the one hand and progress of conscience and solidarity
on the other? Are we heading toward a single civilization?

RG: I think so. The closure of societies is linked to “scapegoat” type practices.
To close is always to define an outside and an inside by means of exclusions
and...

Chapter 9. Democracy

RG: I like Churchill’s quote: it’s “the worst form of government except all
those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

MT: Democracy is not without injustices. Children from affluent families
have a much better chance of becoming big businessmen, great artists, or
even great thinkers, great advocates for the poor, than do those who are born...

Chapter 10. God, Freedom

MT: Why was it necessary for Christ to die? Was it the last guiltless sacrifice
before the abandonment of sacrificial systems?

RG: Well, the other previous victims weren’t guilty either. Christ dies because
he refuses to submit to the law of violence, he denounces it whenever he
speaks, and human beings, by refusing his Revelation, necessarily direct their
violence back at...

Chapter 11. Freud, and a Few Others

RG: What I like about Freud is a certain kind of analysis, a way of writing, and
of working with texts. What I don’t like is his fundamental prejudice against
culture and against the family: Civilization and Its Discontents, “the Oedipus
complex.” What Freud doesn’t see is that social and religious institutions
have an essentially protective function. They decrease the risk of conflict.
Of...

Chapter 12. A Method, a Life, a Man

MT: We’ve put a lot of emphasis on the unconscious nature of the mechanisms
and phenomena we’ve been talking about. Which leads me to the
following, rather paradoxical, question: in the end, does it help to reveal
Revelation, to talk about it explicitly as you’re doing?

RG: What do you mean by “does it help”? If religion is the truth, “it helps”
more than we can...

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